Languages & Linguistics
Rhetorical Situation
The rhetorical situation refers to the circumstances in which communication occurs, including the audience, purpose, and context. It involves understanding the needs and expectations of the audience, the purpose of the communication, and the specific context in which the communication takes place. This concept is important in analyzing and creating effective language and communication strategies.
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7 Key excerpts on "Rhetorical Situation"
eBook - PDFThe Realms of Rhetoric
The Prospects for Rhetoric Education
- Joseph Petraglia, Deepika Bahri, Joseph Petraglia, Deepika Bahri(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- SUNY Press(Publisher)
Rhetorical Situation, then, provides a way of uniting speaking and writing instruction, offering a common goal for both as well as some common instructional strategies. Moreover, Rhetorical Situation provides a way of negotiating a working relationship between the specific and the general. It established a means for conceiving of our course as consisting of three interacting levels of generality. At the most general level is the abstract concept of Rhetorical Situation itself. Students could be taught to understand the features of discourse that may be applied to practically any learning situation that involved speaking and writ- ing. This generalized understanding became the unifying theme of the course, reconceptualized as the four-pronged Strategic Communication Model (the terms motivation, audience, description, and application replacing the terms exi- gence, audience, constraints, and fitting response). Students are taught to use this model to analyze any academic situation that they confront that requires oral and/or written communication. Their mastery of this broadly applicable model enables them to confront communication tasks with confidence so that they will be able to develop a fitting response. The goal is to make them “think like a communicator.” On the next lower level of generality are the actual discourse situations that the students learn about and perform as exercises and assignments for the class. These consist of genres mentioned most frequently in our interviews with textiles faculty, the speaking and writing tasks that students would encounter in their academic work: the academic lecture (critical and attentive listening, question asking, note taking); academic summaries (oral and written summaries of technical material); lab reports, essay exams, and group work (setting group climate, conflict); project proposals (oral and written); progress reports (oral); and project presentations (oral and written).
eBook - PDFRhetorical Listening in Action
A Concept-Tactic Approach
- Krista Ratcliffe, Kyle Jensen(Authors)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Parlor Press, LLC(Publisher)
Ratcliffe and Jensen 80 What Is Rhetorical Situation as a Rhetorical Concept? Traditionally, the term Rhetorical Situation refers to contexts that frame everyday writing practices. For classical Greek rhetoricians, context was theorized as kairos, a term that signifies not just an argument’s time and place but also its “timeliness, appropriateness, decorum, symmetry, [and] balance” (Pantelides). For theorists of modern rhetoric, 6 context has been theorized via a chicken-and-egg debate about Rhetorical Situations, with Lloyd Bitzer arguing that an external situation “invites” responses (5) 7 and Richard Vatz counterarguing that people’s interpretative lenses determine whether they “choose or do not choose” to construct situa- tions and exigences for writing (160). 8 By focusing on how a rhetor either responds to or constructs situations, both Bitzer’s and Vatz’s concepts champion rhetorical agency but reduce it mostly to personal agency, with the writer being the respondent to or constructor of situations. To understand the implications of this focus, consider again the work of Ida B. Wells. When in the 1890s this Black journalist wrote anti- lynching pamphlets and editorials, she was invoking her personal agency to protest white people’s agency to lynch as vigilantes as well as the dis- cursive, cultural, and material agencies of lynching as they existed at that time. 9 Bitzer’s lens might invite writers to argue that Wells is re- sponding to specific situations; thus, they would focus on the lynching scenes about which she writes, which of course are important. Vatz’s lens might invite writers to argue that Wells constructed the situations for her writing by selecting certain scenes to emphasize, narrate, and offer evidence for her argument; thus, writers would focus on the scenes Wells created via her writing.
eBook - ePubOrganizational Rhetoric
Situations and Strategies
- Mary F. Hoffman, Debra J. Ford(Authors)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
Situation or context has long been a key component of the study of communication. When people tell us something was said, we may ask them to explain the context in which it was said in order to help us understand what the comment might mean. Just as context is important in understanding communication in everyday life, it is also important in understanding how rhetoric works in organizations. In this chapter, we explore how two rhetorical scholars talk about the idea of situations, and look at how context is unique in organizations. We conclude by providing some specific instruction on how to research and analyze the Rhetorical Situation.Because rhetoric is strategic—created to address issues or solve problems—it is important that those studying rhetoric understand the contexts in which messages are created. Probably the best-known perspective on context and rhetoric is that of Lloyd Bitzer (1968), who coined the term “the Rhetorical Situation.”TWO PERSPECTIVES ON Rhetorical SituationSBitzer first introduced the concept of the Rhetorical Situation in 1968, and his work has been key in how rhetorical critics analyze and understand the circumstances in which rhetoric is created and received. In 1971, Richard Vatz challenged Bitzer’s perspective, and suggested a new way of understanding Rhetorical Situations. Each of these perspectives, though different philosophically, offers important insights for those who study or create organizational rhetoric. We first review Bitzer’s take on the Rhetorical Situation, and then explore Vatz’s challenge.Bitzer’s Perspective: Situations Call for RhetoricBitzer’s (1968) primary argument was that situations call rhetoric into being. In other words, situations exist in the physical and social world, and rhetoric is required to address them. He also argued that the situation itself determines what an appropriate and effective response will look like. It is the duty of the person creating the rhetoric to determine what kind of response will be able to resolve the situation.
eBook - ePub- Allegra Goodman, Michael Prince, Emmeline Pidgen(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Broadview Press(Publisher)
Rhetorical Situation.If people communicate all the time without thinking twice, why is it important to understand the Rhetorical Situation and its elements? First, rhetorical knowledge enables us to read critically, providing tools and vocabulary for evaluating texts and images. Second, rhetorical knowledge helps us to write effectively, as we consider the best way to convey a message to a particular audience. Let’s look more closely at the key elements of the Rhetorical Situation.PURPOSEPurpose is your motivation, the desire, the need that drives you to communicate. Sometimes rhetorical purpose is straightforward. You ask the waiter for a spoon, because yours fell on the floor and you need a clean one. Sometimes purpose is complex. When Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” he had at least two motives in mind—to argue directly with a group of ministers who advised against immediate protests against racial injustice and to make a larger statement defining human freedom and dignity. In each case, purpose drives communication.In college, your purpose depends on the assignment. Some assignments require you to inform. Reporting the results of a chemistry experiment, you inform your reader. Some assignments require you to persuade. You write a speech arguing for campaign finance reform. Still other assignments require a mix of information and persuasion. You set up an argument by informing your reader about previous research on campaign finance and the electoral system, and then you try to persuade your reader of your own viewpoint. There are those assignments which ask for a written analysis of a document or an image or an event or a data set. Alternatively, an instructor may ask you to entertain with storytelling, or to move your reader with poetry, or to spark debate with your reporting, or to provide a record of an event. The possibilities are endless, but in each case your purpose provides a reason or motivation
- John C. Stube(Author)
- 2006(Publication Date)
- T&T Clark(Publisher)
Analyzing the Rhetorical Situation A rhetorical analysis of this situation will take into account all its various aspects: the immediate context; the speaker, audience and speech; the arrangement of the whole; and the rhetorical devices utilized. In the ancient rhetorical handbooks, the art of rhetoric was discussed under five chief categories: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. 57 This five-fold division was especially developed by the Romans. The first three categories will primarily concern us here. For Aristotle, rhetoric was divided into three main components: the preparation for the speech which included the discovery of all available means of persuasion; style, which included language, diction and emphasis; and organization. 58 Style and organization were treated by Aristotle with brevity. His primary emphasis was on the first category which corresponds to 'invention'. 59 Aristotle's definition of rhetoric and his understanding of what consti-tutes effective communication is foundational for almost all other treat-ments of rhetoric. His work is the standard upon which others build or the point from which they depart and remains definitive. He writes, 'Let rhet-oric be defined as an ability in each particular case, to see the available means of persuasion.' 60 These 'means', or pisteis, are the proofs by which a speaker or author brings about effective persuasion: 'Of ihepisteis provided through speech there are three species: for some are in the character [ethos] of the speaker, and some in disposing the listener in some way [pathos], and some in the argument [logos] itself, by showing or seeming to show 57. Cicero, De Oratore I. 31. 142, 99. Rhetorica Ad Herennium I. 2. 3, 7. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria III. 3. 1, 383. Cicero, De Inventione I. 7. 9, 19. 58. D. Cunningham, Faithful Persuasion, 17-18. 59. The Romans came to emphasize style and arrangement much more than did Aristotle.
eBook - PDF- Joachim Knape, Alan L. Fortuna(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
that during the course of the communication, one or the other speaker is trying to impose his own point of view or his own intentions through the use of persuasive speech. In short, my observation focuses on the rhetorical factor in communi- cation. This factor is the phenomena of persuasion, with all its implications. Thus, I am not simply interested in the question of how they communicate on the island in general: how their language is ordered, how it works, what kinds of texts are exchanged, what is narrated etc. On the contrary, I look at the matter from a very specific angle, namely: what are the conditions of successful communication on this island? That is the rhetorical question.” Lévi-Strauss isn’t satisfied with this answer, “although this is a clearly directed question, the phenomena you want to analyze go far beyond what Herr Lausberg has just presented to us as ‘rhetoric’.” 41 Jacobs 2002, p. 213. 88 Language or Rhetoric? A Dialog “You’re right,” I reply. “Herr Lausberg concentrates entirely on the internal set of rules and regulations that have been established over a period of two- and-a-half-thousand years for the composition of rhetorically overcoded texts. He represents a tradition which views rhetoric as an art of speaking well, an ars bene dicendi. These rhetoricians devote their attention to the linguistic and non-linguistic overcodes that have arisen over the course of history. They are regularities that join with the grammatical regularities in the construction of a text. The grammarian is interested in convenient and correct sentences. The intrinsic rhetorician is interested in overcodes, in forms like parallelism or chi- asmus, which you can build on top of the grammatical foundation, and which promise some kind of specific effect. This intrinsic perspective is of course very limited, despite the fact that it stems from a long-standing tradition.” “That is why I called my book the ‘Handbook of Literary Rhetoric’,” Laus- berg interjects.
- Jim A. Kuypers, Andrew King, Jim A. Kuypers, Andrew King(Authors)
- 2001(Publication Date)
- Praeger(Publisher)
Second, they suggest that public knowledge constitutes the boundaries of a Rhetorical Situation and serves as the authorizing agency in determining whether a response is “fitting”; during a crisis, public knowledge is in flux, potentially modified by new information that may affect perception of the event(s). As public understanding is altered, the Rhetorical Situation changes. 85 RECENT EXTENSIONS OF THE THEORY Barbara Biesecker took the discussion of situational theory to another level in her 1989 essay, “Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation from within the Thematic of Differance.’’ 86 One of the recognized shortcomings of Bitzer’s conceptualization of situation is the lack of consideration for the audience. This gap in the theory becomes increasingly problematic as the locus of concern for theorists and critics shifts from the rhetor and the text to the audience. Biesecker attempts to address this theoretic lacuna by focusing on the thematic of differance as part of the postmodern perspective on situation. One reason for the general lack of attention to audience in past theories of rhetoric is the assumption that audiences are reasonably homogeneous and serve as receptive vessels for the invention and presentation of the rhetor. Postmodern thought has shattered this illusion of homogeneity, a realization that is reinforced by modern cultural awareness. In Biesecker’s construction, the audience becomes part of the situational dynamic, both acted upon and acting upon the discourse.
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